Joaquín Sabina, Wit in Verse: An Exploration of the Humorous Implications of His Poetic Meter

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24197/cel.16.2025.310-339

Keywords:

Sabina, humor, meter, enjambment, rhyme, digital humanities

Abstract

Humor finds a fertile and multifaceted ground in the lyrics of Joaquín Sabina. This study explores the role of metrics (verses, stanzaic forms, rhymes, enjambments, etc.) in his humorous compositions, addressing questions such as: Do his most comedic songs adhere to specific meters or rhymes? Are there playful rhymes or enjambments? What is the relationship between humor and metrics in his work?

Based on a manual analysis of his entire song corpus, a subcorpus of his humorous compositions was identified. Subsequently, using automated tools to analyze metrics, rhyme, and other formal characteristics of verse, such as enjambment, this study seeks to answer these questions. The aim is to demonstrate how poetic structures play a decisive role in constructing humor in the lyrics of the singer-songwriter from Úbeda.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

  • Clara Isabel Martínez Cantón, , Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (España)

    Clara I. Martínez Cantón is a Full Professor of Literary Theory at the National Distance Education University (UNED). She holds a Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from UNED (2011), awarded with the Extraordinary Doctorate Prize. As a result of her dissertation, she also received the 16th Mariano Rodríguez Prize for Young Researchers (2012).

    She has over 15 years of experience in undergraduate and postgraduate university teaching, as well as in Ph.D. supervision. She is actively involved in administrative tasks at her university and serves as the coordinator of the new Master’s in Advanced Studies and Research in Hispanic Literature and its Theatre at UNED.

    Her research focuses on metrics, poetry, and Digital Humanities, particularly in the computational analysis of metrical and stylistic concepts. Her publications mainly explore contemporary poetry and its rhythmic features, contemporary oral poetry, and the relationship between poetry and music.

    Since 2019, she has been the Principal Investigator of the PoeMAS Project, dedicated to the study of music-poetry relationships, in collaboration with Guillermo Laín Corona.

    Since 2018, she has been the Editor-in-Chief of the Revista de Humanidades Digitales and collaborates in various roles with other academic journals.

  • Guillermo Marco Remón, , Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (España)

    Guillermo Marco Remón (Madrid, 1997) is a poet and Ph.D. candidate in Artificial Intelligence at the Natural Language Processing Research Group of UNED, funded by a University Teaching Training Fellowship (FPU). His research areas include language model evaluation, automatic social media moderation, computational creativity, and Digital Humanities. He is the author of the poetry collections Otras nubes (Rialp, 2019), runner-up for the 2018 Adonáis Poetry Prize, and Perder el tiempo (Isla Elefante, 2023), winner of the III National Poetry Prize of Churriana.

  • Pablo Núñez Díaz, , Universidad de Oviedo (España)

    Pablo Núñez Díaz is a lecturer of Spanish Literature at the University of Oviedo and an associate lecturer at the UNED. His research focus is contemporary Spanish poetry and the relationship between literature and the press. He is the author of a new edition of Luis Alberto de Cuenca’s El reino blanco (Reino de Cordelia, 2024) and the anthology La poesía de los tangos (Impronta, 2024). He is co-editor of the poetry magazine Anáfora. Creación y Crítica.

References

Alonso, Dámaso (1952). Poetas españoles contemporáneos. Madrid: Gredos.

Bergson, Henri (2019). La risa. Barcelona: Marge Books.

Carbonell, Joaquín (2011). Pongamos que hablo de Joaquín. Barcelona: Ediciones B.

Domínguez Caparrós, José (2009) “De métrica burlesca”, en Ignacio Arellano y Antonio Lorente Medina (eds.). Poesía satírica y burlesca en la Hispanoamérica colonial. Madrid: Iberoamericana, pp. 77-92.

Domínguez Caparrós, José (2014a). Métrica española. Madrid: UNED.

Domínguez Caparrós, José (2014b). “Métrica y sátira”, Rhythmica. Revista Española de Métrica Comparada, 5-6. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5944/rhythmica.13117.

Domínguez Caparrós, José (2016). Diccionario de métrica española. Madrid: Alianza.

Estébanez Calderón, Demetrio (1996). Diccionario de términos literarios. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.

Guitart, Jorge (2004). Sonido y sentido: teoría y práctica de la pronunciación del español contemporáneo. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.

Jáuregui, Juan de (1973). Obras. Ed. de Inmaculada Ferrer Alba. Madrid: Espasa.

Laín Corona, Guillermo (2024). “«Marxista de la tendencia progrouchiana». Figuraciones del humor en Joaquín Sabina”, en Guillermo Laín Corona (ed.) Soaquín Sabina: siete versos tristes para una canción. Madrid: Visor, pp. 13-89.

Leuci, Verónica (2021). “Humores poéticos: aproximaciones al humor en la poesía española de las últimas décadas”, Revista Valenciana. Estudios de filosofía y letras, 29, pp. 161-192. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15174/rv.v14i29.571.

Llera, José Antonio (2001). “Poéticas del humor: desde el novecentismo hasta la época contemporánea”, Revista de literatura, 63(126), pp. 461-476. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3989/revliteratura.2001.v63.i126.216.

Remón, Guillermo (2024). “grmarco/Spanish-Rhyme-Annotator”. Disponible en https://github.com/grmarco/Spanish-Rhyme-Annotator [14/1/2025].

Marco Remón, Guillermo y Gonzalo, Julio (2021). “Escansión automática de poesía española sin silabación”, Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, 66, pp. 77-87. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26342/2021-66-6.

Martínez Cantón, Clara Isabel et al. (2021). “Automatic Enjambment Detection as a New Source of Evidence in Spanish Versification”, en A.-S. Bories, G. Purnelle, y H. Marchal (eds.) Plotting Poetry: On Mechanically Enhanced Reading. Liège: Presses Universitaires de Liège, pp. 93-112.

Martínez Fernández, José Enrique (2001). “Final de verso en partícula átona (tradición e innovación métrica en la poesía de Antonio Carvajal)”, Signa, 10, pp. 295-312. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5944/signa.vol10.2001.32287.

Morley, S. Griswold (1927). “La modificación del acento de la palabra en el verso castellano”, Revista de Filología Española, (XIV), pp. 256-272.

Quilis, Antonio (1993). Métrica Española. Barcelona: Ariel.

Romano, Marcela (1991). “En torno a una canción ‘diversa’”. Revista del Centro de Letras Hispanoamericanas - CELEHIS, 1, pp. 135-143. https://fh.mdp.edu.ar/revistas/index.php/celehis/article/view/199.

Romano, Marcela (1993). “Parodia y deconstrucción en la canción de Joan Manuel Serrat”, Revista de estudios hispánicos, 20, pp. 57-74.

Romano, Marcela, Lucifora, María Clara y Riva, Sabrina (eds.) (2021). Un antiguo don de fluir: La canción, entre música y literatura. Mar del Plata: Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata.

Ruiz, Pablo et al. (2017). “Enjambment Detection in a Large Diachronic Corpus of Spanish Sonnets”, in Proceedings of the Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics…, pp. 27-32. Disponible en http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W17-2204 [14/1/2025].

Sabina, Joaquín (2007). Con buena letra. Ed. actualizada. Madrid: Planeta.

Sabina, Joaquín (2009). Vinagre y rosas. Madrid: Sony Music.

Sabina, Joaquín y Serrat, Joan Manuel (2012). La orquesta del Titanic. Madrid: Sony Music.

Sabina, Joaquín (2017). Lo niego todo. Madrid: Sony Music.

Soto Zaragoza, Javier (2024a). “Cantar curso rimado: la rima en las letras de Joaquín Sabina”, Anuario de Estudios Filológicos, 47, pp. 253-276. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17398/2660-7301.47.253.

Soto Zaragoza, Javier (2024b). La biblioteca de Joaquín Sabina: influencias e intertextualidades en sus letras. Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert.

Downloads

Published

2025-07-04

Issue

No. 16 (2025)

Section

ARTICLES

License

Copyright (c) 2025 Clara Isabel Martínez Cantón, Guillermo Marco Remón, Pablo Núñez Díaz

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This journal enables free and immediate access to its content to foster global knowledge.

The articles published at Castilla. Estudios de Literatura will have a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

The authors continue as owners of their works, and can republish their articles in another medium without having to request authorization, as long as they indicate that the work was originally published in Castilla. Estudios de Literatura.

How to Cite

Joaquín Sabina, Wit in Verse: An Exploration of the Humorous Implications of His Poetic Meter. (2025). Castilla. Estudios De Literatura, 16, 310-339. https://doi.org/10.24197/cel.16.2025.310-339